Blitzfreeze (39 page)

‘“
Cerdo, cerdo
,” ’e ’owls from the other side o’ the road, and we thought this was some kind o’ political party cry at first. But soon as we found out that it meant “swine”, we rung over to the boys at Davids Strasse. “There’s a pointy-’eaded bastard from South America down on the street shoutin’ ‘Adolf,
cerdo
! Adolf,
cerdo
!’”, we said.

‘“That’s nice,” says the desk-man, with the sleep still in ’is eyes. “’Ope ’e keeps on with it!”

‘“What’s it mean then?” we ask ’im

‘“Look it up in a Spanish dictionary,” ’e suggests. “Probably the Spanish for ‘Eil!’”.

‘But they must’ve looked it up for themselves,’ continues Tiny, ‘cause they was all there with blue lights, truncheons, the lot, in under seven bleedin’ minutes. That “cerdo” bleedin’ Indian got whipped off quicker’n the devil takin’ a nun off on Easter mornin’!’

‘Pick up your arms! Single file after me!’ orders Oberleutnant Moser.

A couple of miles further on we are fired on from the darkness of the forest. A rain of bullets cuts the bark from the trees around us, ricochets plow channels in the frozen snow. The moon hides behind a cloud. The impenetrable darkness is split by flashes from hand-weapons.

Tiny has taken up position with the LMG behind a large fir. He is firing whenever he sees a muzzle-flash.

‘Move, boy!’ he snarls at the Professor. ‘Don’t you know
we’re fightin’ for Newropa an’
lebensraum
!
Untermensch
must be wiped out to make room for more Germans!’

The firing dies away slowly and the sound of running feet can be heard disappearing into the forest. Frozen twigs snap loudly.

‘Sections space out!’ orders the Oberleutnant. ‘No. 2 Section take the lead. The enemy will try to split us at the break in the woods but we’ve got to get through. All wounded will be taken with us. If a single one is left behind I’ll have every NCO court-martialled. I hope I have made myself perfectly clear?’

The company advances in open order. We are continually forced to take cover from furious bursts of MG fire. Why not surrender? On the Eastern Front nobody surrenders.

Three men from No. 4 are wounded. Unteroffizier Lehnart gets his knee plowed open by an explosive bullet. He cannot stand on the leg, but we make him a support out of a carbine tied tightly to it so that the butt serves him as a foot. He groans loudly at every step, but it’s better than being left lying in the snow.

It’s unbelievable what a human being can endure. We have often observed this with wounded men. Leutnant Gilbert walked several miles holding his entrails in place with his hands. Oberschütz Zöbel crawled across a ploughed field with a smashed hip. Pioneer Blaske hobbled to the main dressing station with his whole face shot away and one leg crushed. Not to speak of Hauptfeldwebel Bauer, who dragged himself to the doctors with both feet hanging around his neck on a string. He thought they could be sewn on again. Fahnenjunker West, his father was a general by the way, lay out in no-man’s-land for three days, spitted on the posts of the barbed-wire with his lungs hanging out of his back expanding and contracting like great balloons. Porta and I brought him in. He lived four days at the dressing station. I could go on and on like this.

We have become experienced veterans, although most of us are no more than twenty-two. We know all about how to
kill people. We know, too, whether or not a wounded man will make it. We have a name for every way in which a man can be wounded: Full lung perforation, lung penetration, flesh wound, belly perforation, explosive scrapes, infantry stab, grenade lesions, disjointing shot. We have sixty different names for the various kinds of head wound. Our anatomical knowledge is astounding. In a clearing in the forest a halt is called to get the company together. Signals Feldwebel Bloch has had his shoulder torn open by a ricochet. The bleeding is ugly. With the help of a sling Sanitäts-soldat Tafel manages to stop the bleeding. He works quickly and professionally. Tiny helps him, handing him the required instruments. He sews up the wound with skilled fingers.

‘You’ll be all right now, Herr Feldwebel,’ he says moodily, as he finishes dressing the shoulder.

‘You’re quite a bleedin’ bone carpenter,’ exclaims Tiny, astonished.

‘You might say that,’ answers Tafel, looking away. Tafel came to the unit straight from Germersheim.

‘I mean like a real doctor feller as can turn an honest copper fixin’ up a singed prick that’s been out ploughin’ up the open market,’ continues Tiny.

‘All right then!’ snaps Tafel, irritated.

‘
Are
you a real doctor with diplomas an’ university degrees an’ all that?’ shouts Tiny enthusiastically.

‘Yes, I
am
! So what? Now I’m a Sanitätsgefreiter and that’s enough of that.’

‘Porta,’ screams Tiny. ‘Our bleedin’ Sani’s a real gut-scraper. Come an’ take a look at ‘im. Some unit we got!’

‘If you’re a real doctor, why the hell aren’t you an officer?’ asks Porta wonderingly. ‘What did they send you to Germersheim for?’

‘Oh, very well!’ replies Tafel unwillingly. ‘I knew you’d find out sooner or later. But I’m not going to make a public confession to you lot. You can ask me to go, and I’ll go, because there’s just one thing you can note down, and that’s the simple fact that I look after you because it’s my duty and
apart from that I just couldn’t care less what happens to you!’

‘Herr Oberleutnant,’ shouts Tiny, in pretended horror. ‘Our Sani’s run his head into a newspaper. He don’t care a fart if you’re playin’ the ’arp tomorrow or not!’

‘I didn’t say that,’ says the Sani indignantly.

‘You said you couldn’t care less about us,’ Porta breaks in.

‘If it means so much to you,’ replies the Sanitäts-Gefreiter, sullenly. ‘All right; I was a doctor.’

‘Then you’re still a doctor,’ states the Old Man, puffing hard on his silver-lidded pipe.

‘I am not allowed to work as a doctor. It’s surprising they let me work as a medical orderly.’

‘Did somebody go an’ drop dead while you was pressin’ ’is bollocks?’ asks Tiny interestedly.

‘Shut up,’ snarls the Old Man, ‘
You
can’t understand what it’s all about anyway,
that’s
certain.’

‘No, thank Gawd,’ sighs Tiny happily. ‘The bleedin’ upper classes make such a lot o’ bleedin’ piss over fuck-all. Things they fix with a couple o’ loose teeth, on the Reeperbahn.’

‘Are you quite finished?’ asks Porta. ‘How you
do
go on!’

‘I had a great many wealthy patients, hypochondriacs every one of them,’ continues Tafel, wearily. ‘After a while they began to irritate me. An upper class lady had invented some of the most mysterious illnesses. I sent her to Bad Gastein to get rid of her and gave her a sealed letter to my colleague and friend, the doctor at the health resort. He is also a medical orderly now.’

‘Did you give her the letter to take with her?’ gasps Porta. ‘You must’ve been out of your bloody mind!’

‘Clear as mud,’ chortles Tiny, pleased. ‘This old mare’s gone ’ome fast as ’er pumps could carry ’er ’an steamed the bleedin’ letter open. Who wouldn’t? Everybody wants to know what’s wrong with ’em.’

‘What the devil did you put in it?’ asks Stege.

‘It was foolish, but I was so annoyed with the bitch that I wrote to my friend: Herewith Europe’s most hopeless case of malingering. There is nothing wrong with her but too much
leisure and too much money. Dip her in your warm swindle bath with ten pounds of kitchen salt in it and then pack her down in the most stinking mud you’ve got. Both she and her husband are the parasites of the age. Write her a huge bill and she will think you are a genius.’

‘Very well,’ nods Porta. ‘I don’t even need to put on my glasses. One night there’s a knock on your door, and with classic stupidity you open it instead of shinning out of the back window and over the balcony. Even a newborn babe from Weding would have known that a couple of snap-brims in leather coat were marking time outside your door.’

‘Yes,’ admits Tafel, tiredly.

‘An’ who
was
this psycho-dame’s feller?’ asks Tiny, with interest.

‘SS-Brigadenführer,’ answers Tafel. It sounds as if he is saying ‘Death!’

‘You’re more’n bleedin’ stupid,’ says Tiny, contemptuously. ‘They must’ve scraped you out with a bleedin’ spoon at the maternity clinic.’

‘Why didn’t you give her a trip on the banana express?’ asks Porta. ‘What d’you think she was paying you for, anyway?’

‘Leave him alone, now!’ snarls Oberleutnant Moser. ‘Let’s get a move on. The new German positions can’t be far off. There can’t be more than a day’s march to them.’

‘The cowardly swine are already in Berlin,’ says Stege, pessimistically.

‘So would we be,’ grins Porta, ‘If we’d had the chance.’ No. 3 Section is sent out on reconnaissance. They curse bitterly as they disappear across the creaking snow.

‘Maybe they’ll go in the wrong direction,’ says Barcelona, listlessly, ‘and walk deeper and deeper into the snow.’

‘West is always right for us,’ answers Porta, sawing a piece of a long Russian loaf which is frozen to the hardness of iron. He shares it out amongst those closest in the leading section.

A recruit stretches out his hand.

Porta raps him on the knuckles with his bayonet.

‘There are ninety million people in Greater Germany, Adolf says, and this section can’t feed them all! Ring to your Führer and tell him you’re hungry!’

‘West,’ mumbles Stege, tiredly. ‘You don’t hear anything else these days. Before it was always East.’

‘You’ll get used to marching West,’ says Tiny, letting go a gigantic fart. ‘Maybe Adolf’ll want us to liberate the Berliners and get the Party some
lebensraum
on the bleedin’ Rhine!’ He bends over whooping madly, one shout of laughter following the other, as if he’ll never stop. The threat of defeat seems comical to him.

The company marches on, through frozen swamps, over heights and through thick forests. Sniper groups and partisan units are met and beaten off.

‘We’ll get through,’ says the Old Man to Oberleutnant Moser, during a short break. ‘Long as we’ve got ammunition, we’ll use our guns for all they’re worth!’

‘An’ when we’ve banged off all our powder then we’ll tear Ivan’s ring out an’ pull it down over ‘is bleedin’ napper,’ remarks Tiny from the darkness.

‘What about surrendering?’ asks Wachtmeister Bloch.

‘I’d rather pull the devil by the tail!’ says Porta.

‘Gawd but was I lucky to get into this bleedin’ Army,’ grins Tiny. ‘Even though I ’ave got to be Obergefreiter you mustn’t think I’ve gone militarist!’

‘We don’t!’ laughs Porta.

‘Come on, move!’ orders Moser, sharply. ‘Close up! Keep touch with the man behind you! Keep alert up in front!’

‘That man’s a bloody sadist,’ grumbles Stege. ‘The warmad bastard never gives us a second’s peace.’

A patrol comes panting back. ‘Three miles on there’s a village where a tank regiment has gone into quarters,’ reports Unteroffizier Basel.

‘Hell and damnation!’ curses Oberleutnant Moser. ‘What’s on the other side of the village?’

‘We don’t know,’ answers Basel.

‘What the hell do you think I sent you out on patrol for, man?’ Moser flares up hysterically.

‘Herr Oberleutnant, I believe the forest ends a mile further on. Two T-34s are guarding the village on this side.’

‘Why, then, do you tell me you don’t know where they are?’ thunders Oberleutnant Moser, his face going a dark red.

‘Goin’ on for evenin’ we come to this one-night-stand ‘otel, where you can rent a bed for an hour at a time,’ Tiny is explaining to a circle of listeners. ‘Well, we’d organized a white Mercedes on the Reeperbahn, so we were travellin’ in style. The first thing me bleedin’ eye falls on when I wakes up in the mornin’ is a bunch o’ light-coloured parsley tucked away between a couple o’ fat thighs. What the ’ell, I think, ’ave you gone to sleep in a knocker? So I feels about, cautious-like, to see if it really was a bit of crumpet I was parked alongside of, an’ who should pop up out of the bedclothes but “Strauss Waltzes” from Kastanien Alleé. ’Er, you know, as bangs the old joanna to death in “Passaten”.

‘“Mornin’, ’ubby,” she says, fresh as you please.

‘“Morning, pedal-pusher,” says I, listenin’ fascinated to the blackbirds singin’ in the pear tree outside the window.

‘“Bein’ married is lovely,” she says a bit later.

‘“Don’t know,” I says, “Never tried it!”

‘She starts off again, chewin’ away at me old bonce, and we take another trip in the gondola while the kettle’s boilin’ for coffee.

‘“What’s all this talk about marriage? ’Ave you gone an’ got yourself ’itched up some whacked-up womb-snatcher or other?”

‘“You’re
funny
,” she says, clickin’ ’er loose teeth at me. “Don’t you tell me you’ve no memory of us two bein’ chained together in ’oly matrimony yesterday night? Cause if you ’
ave
then Mum ’ere’s got a few nasty tricks to show you, as some Japanese wrestlers I once knew give me a rough ol’ knowledge of.”

‘“Chained together?” I yell. “You got softenin’ o’ the
brain, or somethin’ girl? I don’t need no bleedin’ contract to get ’old o’
my
ration o’ crumpet. I’d never dream of it.”